2017 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Dynamic attentional control of internal representations in visual working memory
| Project/Area Number |
17K13962
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
李 キ 東京大学, 大学院人文社会系研究科(文学部), 助教 (30757711)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2017-04-01 – 2019-03-31
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| Keywords | visual working memory / dynamic control / retro-cue |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Visual working memory supports a wide range of complex cognitive activities such as problem solving and creative thinking. Flexible manipulation of visual working memory contents is especially crucial in the real world because visual information constantly gains or losses relevance as the environments we interact with are rapidly changing. In FY 2017, the retro-dimension-cue paradigm was used to investigate flexible manipulation of stored information during visual working memory maintenance. Participants’ task was to memorize objects defined by combinations of color, shape and location, and decide whether a feature swap occurred between two objects after a retention interval. During the retention interval, a retro-dimension cue which informed participants of the irrelevant dimension was presented. The results show that participants’ memory for visual stimuli was significantly improved by retrospectively cueing them to ignore objects’ shapes. However, cueing participants to ignore the locations of the objects profoundly impaired performance. These findings indicate that spatial and non-spatial features may have different roles in visual working memory maintenance.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
Data collected in FY2017 revealed important regulation and limitation of the manipulation process in visual working memory. Specifically, clear evidence has been obtained demonstrating that non-spatial features can be flexibly suppressed during visual working memory maintenance while spatial information is difficult to suppress. These new findings provide insights into the dynamic control mechanisms of visual working memory, and shed light on the structure of visual working memory representation as well.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Experiments conducted in FY 2017 focused on comparing the effect of retro-dimension-cues between the location dimension and the shape dimension. The results demonstrated an asymmetric effect of location-cues and shape-cues on visual working memory representations. One important question requires further investigation is, whether the asymmetric effect of location and shape retro-cues reflect a general difference between spatial and non-spatial dimensions. In FY2018, experiments will be conducted to investigate the generality of the effects found in FY2017.
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| Causes of Carryover |
In FY 2017, I directed most of my efforts to refining the experimental design and collecting psychophysical data. Because important new findings on the dynamic control mechanisms of visual working memory have been obtained, I will attend two national and two international academic conferences to present my research findings. The remained amount of FY 2017 will be used to cover the travel expenses and conference expenses.
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